Sunday, September 03, 2017

WHAT COMES AFTER DEMOCRACY? THE PURSUANCE PROJECT?"



In my long and checquered career I don’t think I was ever part of any institution from private to governmental to NGO to religious that didn't lie to me or ask me to lie to someone else — or at least lie by omitting information someone needed but it would be inconvenient for them to have.  I could make a list, but it would include everyone which aborts the purpose of a list.

My father would say, "Let's take a vote and then I'll decide."  He called this democracy.  Usually he had already decided.

At our house when I was growing up, there was much discussion of cooperatives versus corporations, with cooperatives being ideal (because of the community efforts on the Canadian prairie) and corporations being necessary predators.  That was before my father’s employer (Pacific Supply Cooperative) was bought by a corporation which fired my father before he was quite old enough to retire.

All this stuff did not build confidence.  

Since then the only cooperative I really trust is the Seminary Co-op Bookstore in Hyde Park.  https://www.semcoop.com  It’s two doors over from the Meadville/Lombard Theological School which could not be sustained in their building which was sold to the U of Chicago. (The reasons are relevant but this is not really the place and time.)  Basically, the success of the bookstore is because of feedback loops between managers and customers, emotional investment, and negotiable rules and obligations.  It was always timely and transparent.

For comparison, Powell’s in Portland is an independent family-owned bookstore that began in Hyde Park three blocks along from M/L.   http://www.powells.com/info/about-us  "Powell's roots began in Chicago, where Michael Powell, as a University of Chicago graduate student, opened his first bookstore in 1970. Encouraged by friends and professors, including novelist Saul Bellow, Michael borrowed $3,000 to assume a lease on a bookstore. The venture proved so successful that he managed to repay the loan within two months.  Michael's dad, Walter Powell, a retired painting contractor, worked one summer with Michael in the Chicago store. He so enjoyed his experience that upon returning to Portland he opened his own used bookstore."

Powell’s is on its third generation now, Michael’s daughter is running the store, and she is a shrewd, modern, relentless manager who has suffered a few strikes and much criticism.  But she persists and the store goes on.

Used books are a world industry now.  I bought a book by my fourth grade teacher, Mildred Colbert, from a bookstore in Ireland.  I bought Bob Scriver's book about his artifact collection from a private individual in Australia.  No one could have predicted this.

With this as background to establish my small personal investment in the workings of the national and planetary business and government, I’ll introduce something that sounds pretty radical and risky, but a proposal that might actually work.  What comes after democracy?  After capitalism?  After our republic, so undermined and gridlocked that Texas has managed the enormous hazards of explosive materials by simply keeping them secret -- until now.  Explosions on the resulting scale cannot be hidden.  As they say, they can be seen from outer space.  That's just an example of the conflation of business and government.


Quoting Barrett-Brown:
  
“It has become more and more difficult, as the years proceed, to maintain the fiction that the American republic is fundamentally sound. An associated myth—that the great majority of the American electorate are decent people who are entirely capable of overseeing the single most powerful apparatus in history—has also become less viable. The "establishment," as we may as well join in terming it, has likewise lost credibility, for reasons ranging from nonsensical to inarguable. The end result is a crisis of moral authority, and even of amoral authority; this is a society that cannot even produce a proper strongman. But it can certainly produce a disaster, for ourselves and for the world.”

Rumsfeld understood the real lesson of Watergate: the risks of violating our Constitution are vastly eclipsed by the rewards. A theory may be tested by its ability to predict. 

"The most important fact of the 21st century is that any individual can now collaborate with any other individual on the planet.  [my emphasis]"

"It is an absolute certainty that, with sufficient thought, a new mechanism may someday be designed, capable of integrating thousands of talented individuals and existing organizations into a sort of parallel civic ecosystem."

"It is an absolute certainty that, with sufficient thought, a new mechanism may someday be designed, capable of integrating thousands of talented individuals and existing organizations into a sort of parallel civic ecosystem, growing ever more refined in its functioning while perpetually expanding its user base on an invitation basis, and in such a way as to maintain a high average level of competence. If one were to start with a sufficiently resourceful group of initial participants with broad agreement on keystone issues—opposition to the drug war, police state, and mass surveillance, for instance, with these issues chosen in order to establish a reasoned polity sharing common values, if not ideological unanimity—one could expect such a system to quickly expand into a vast and formidable new force in world affairs, capable of advancing reform and confronting criminalized institutions across the globe." 
___________________

At this point we should try anything with a chance of working.  These are the thoughts of Barrett Brown, a person I had never heard of.  I haven’t heard of his books either, though I love the proposed titles.

“ The book was originally titled “Hot, Fat, and Clouded: The Amazing and Amusing Failures of America’s Chattering Class” and consisted of his attack on the ubiquitous newspaper columnists and media pundits whom he argues are undeservedly influential and able to form public opinion…

More soberly:  “The Pursuance System, the culmination of eight years of thought and refinement, will be launched later this year, operating under a basic software framework explained at our website and overseen by a non-profit that we've set up for the purpose.   https://pursuanceproject.org

So far I haven’t been very political on this blog and I hesitate to get labeled that way.  But it's time for all hands on deck. Enough junk mail from deadhead Republicans gets into my system and every afternoon I get robo-calls from purported sheriffs with Texas accents.  They are political deterrents. 

But I have made it a point to attend every Town of Valier council meeting that I could.  No doubt the notes will add up to a potential book about how geology (an ecotone of altitude between the Continental Divide and the prairie) offered the conditions for irrigation, how this came about and how Valier became a player in the world-wide grain economy, but how the little town itself has become a bedroom community where people live while commuting to slightly bigger places with jobs.  And every year the snowpack is smaller so there's less water.

The business of government -- as well as the infrastructure of water, sewer, electricity, telephone, bank, school, church, and their supporting taxes -- even the trees -- are a hundred years old now.  In the interest of saving the town, it becomes tempting to make deals with the devil, like Missoula selling their civic water system to a private corporation.  Just little things, but we are sliding.  

There is one local infrastructure that is growing:  the Internet.  I go into the library and see a row of kids, often Blackfeet in their single digit years, busily cruising world-wide assets.  They ARE in pursuit.

But the bigger governmental entities -- county, state, and federal -- are in pursuit of us, requiring always more, more, more without our votes.  So I'm studying.

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